by Katherine Page
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Workers at the Field Museum in Chicago inspecting birds that were killed when they flew into the windows of the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. Credit: Lauren Nassef/Chicago Field Museum, via Associated Press, via The New York Times, October 8, 2023 |
There’s a circumference of concrete paths
around earth’s freshwater body
down which you ride your bike.
Cold flutters sharp on pink knuckles,
evening cicadas once a deafening scream,
the size of a hummingbird with a tymbal spring
now ghosts gripping tree bark shells.
Some people have bells or shout
on your left but you pedal gently
around clumps of walking friends,
air cupping October leaves as they twirl
petals and click to the asphalt below.
around earth’s freshwater body
down which you ride your bike.
Cold flutters sharp on pink knuckles,
evening cicadas once a deafening scream,
the size of a hummingbird with a tymbal spring
now ghosts gripping tree bark shells.
Some people have bells or shout
on your left but you pedal gently
around clumps of walking friends,
air cupping October leaves as they twirl
petals and click to the asphalt below.
You can’t stop looking at the telephone wires,
the gray space of sky between intersecting lines,
the softest eruptions of birds blooming into flight,
their punctuations of gravitational ease—
comma comma question—
a cote, a murder, a brood,
a flock, a worm, a quarrel,
a charm, a scold,
a trembling.
Nearly a thousand died last night,
warblers, waterthrush, yellowthroats
slamming warm, flapping bodies into the brightness
of a shoreline Chicago glass.
It’s impossible to see where one things starts
and another one ends.
Now even in a first floor apartment
you can still imagine the pattering
of rain on the roof. The maple hands are turning,
neighborhood cats waul through the dark.
In the morning,
a dove coos in the evergreen
outside your tiny window.
Katherine Page is an elementary school teacher and writer living in Chicago. She is working on a manuscript about teaching and learning. She has poems published in Beyond Queer Words, Awakened Voices, Evocations Review, Green Linden Press, Open Minds Quarterly, Wingless Dreamer Press, Rough Cut Press, and Passengers Journal. She is a graduate of the 2022–23 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Poetry Collective in Denver, CO.